The Winds Change For Claudia Shear: Now, She Blows Back

By PETER MARKS

Published: July 16, 1995

NOTHING in Claudia Shear's off-the-wall employment history has prepared her for her oddest job experience of all: being in demand.

Once, as an unemployed actress, Ms. Shear was so desperate for work she took a job answering phones in a Manhattan brothel. But these days, when the telephone rings in her Brooklyn apartment, the calls are often from Hollywood, conveying offers for her to star in romantic comedies or develop sitcoms or attend exclusive film workshops.

"I'm standing in the kitchen stirring pasta and beans, and Jeffrey Katzenberg calls," Ms. Shear said. A look of wonderment crossed her face at her own dropping of the name of the well-known movie executive, who recently formed a movie company with Steven Spielberg, the director, and David Geffen, the producer. "It is all getting a little Bunuel," she added.

That the turnaround in her life should remind her of a movie by the Surrealist film maker is a measure of how far Ms. Shear has come in the year and a half since her one-woman Off Broadway show, "Blown Sideways Through Life," opened to critical raves and played for six months to sold-out audiences. The play is an angry, moving account of the people she met and the tasks, bizarre and humiliating and mundane, that she performed over the course of taking up and then giving up a total of 64 menial jobs in her years as a struggling New York actress.

The rise of Ms. Shear continues on Wednesday at 10 P.M. as her play, tapered just a bit for the time constraints and primmer programming of public television, makes its debut on American Playhouse. Filmed in a frenetic seven days in Manhattan last December for $600,000, the teleplay features a heavyset Ms. Shear, clad in a blue organza gown, recounting her sometimes wrenching, frequently hilarious, adventures in the world of work.

The 32-year-old, Brooklyn-born actress, who has waited on tables, taken messages for doctors and even acted in a risque Italian movie (her part ended up on the cutting-room floor) says television seemed a much more appropriate vehicle than film for "Blown Sideways Through Life." Because the play deals with the everyday frustrations and incongruities of life in the most ordinary of jobs, Ms. Shear said she thought the piece demanded the broader audience television can deliver.

"There was an amazing range of people who came to see the play," Ms. Shear said recently as she sat in a bar in Greenwich Village, nursing a club soda. "That is why I believed it had to be on TV. I think both myself and the subject are accessible. If it had been a movie, it would have ended up at the Angelika, being shown to 50 people," she said of the movie theater complex in Greenwich Village known as a showcase for foreign and independent films.

In some ways, "Blown Sideways" is a daring choice for American Playhouse. Although one-person plays are not new to television, Ms. Shear's piece is not exactly "Mark Twain Tonight." It is, rather, a more personal and idiosyncratic play that may seem, by some viewers' standards, a tad racy, with its occasionally salty language and its colorful yet affecting portrayal of life in the whorehouse where Ms. Shear answered the phones.

Lindsay Law, the executive producer of American Playhouse, said some public television stations would not have run the stage version of the play. "It's tricky," he said. "It mostly has to do with an accumulation of language; when a 60-minute piece is completely sprinkled with questionable language, they can get quite hysterical. And there were several things in the whorehouse sequence that had to be removed. It's a reminder that this country diverges enormously on what it finds acceptable."

Ms. Shear is philosophical about the cuts demanded of some of the more explicit sexual references in the script. "We did have to cut a few things, which I regret," she said. "But I can't think that anyone could watch my piece and think that it is prurient or obscene. And to be fair, I think there are things I can say in person that are much more brutal if they come off your TV set in the house."

The delicacies of adaptation aside, what drew Mr. Law to the project, he says, was its wisdom about a topic that rarely gets such tender treatment. "I loved that it was funny, but I also found it tremendously moving," he said. "In New York, you see how horrible people are to service people. They really are just horrible."

The writing of "Blown Sideways Through Life" was an act of desperation by a woman who is eager to escape what seemed to be turning into a life sentence in the service industry. It all started three years ago in the offices of the New York Theater Workshop in Manhattan, where Ms. Shear, exhausted by the years of rejection for acting jobs, came to ask James Nicola, the workshop's artistic director and a longtime friend, to help her find an agent.

Instead, Mr. Nicola told her to find a pen. After years of hearing her tell tales about her life, he knew she had a natural gift. "She was a great storyteller," Mr. Nicola said. "She would come to visit us here, and I would notice that work would stop, people would gather around to listen to her stories. I thought, well maybe there was a way to focus her energy and make it pay off."

Ms. Shear, a classically trained actress with a lifelong love of books, started scribbling, and during the next two years, she worked with Mr. Nicola and another friend, Christopher Ashley, who would become the play's director, to fashion the monologue. The opening night at the New York Theater Workshop changed her life.

"I had 50 messages on my phone the next morning," said Ms. Shear, who is much slimmer than she was when the teleplay was shot, and has long blondish hair that falls in delicate curls. "After 15 years, it was overnight."

Suddenly she was a person of importance, the object of compliments from the likes of Stephen Sondheim and Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, who also began calling, she said. Soon Ms. Shear was in Hollywood talking deals and collecting screenplay assignments. Robert Redford invited her to Sundance. The book version of "Blown Sideways" was published in the spring by Dial Press, and she has been cast in a movie, "Body Language," a comedy that may be shot this year. She says she is also writing a screenplay about two sisters who hate each other.

The desperate job hunt, it seems, is over.

"I'm not a wannabe," Ms. Shear said, finishing her club soda. "I'm a be."

Photos: Claudia Shear in "Blown Sideways": the play has been tailored a bit for the primmer tastes of public television. (American Playhouse) (pg. 43)